WHAT does an award-winning travel writer do when Covid restrictions stop him globe-trotting — in this instance, sparing us yet another slog to Santiago?
Oliver Smith pulls together a wonderfully eclectic series of visits within Britain, loosely linked by an elastic definition of pilgrimage as a “journey of meaning” — sometimes a literal journey, sometimes “conversations across time”. Thankfully, he is quite clear that “This is not a memoir of a troubled soul hoping to be fixed by the road.”
He likes to bring us to well-worn destinations from an oblique angle. At Lindisfarne — where he takes himself to the café rather than pay to visit the priory ruins — he writes about crossing the causeway barefoot at low tide, camping in the refuge hut as the waters rise. He takes us to Glastonbury through the history of an obscure well at the edge of town, and to Walsingham (the regional “homeland of Alan Partridge”) by the story of its little railway line, and the surprising communities that it connects to the shrine. Stonehenge he approaches through the rise and fall of the Free Festival, and the surprising part played by the Earl of Cardigan, hereditary keeper of Savernake forest, in bearing witness to its brutal suppression.
He is fond of the lumpy perspective that rough sleeping offers. On the Gower, he sleeps in the almost inaccessible sea-cave where the palaeolithic remains of the Red Lady of Paviland (actually a man) were discovered. Along the Ridgeway, he spends the night in a long barrow. On a tiny island on Derwent Water, associated with Beatrix Potter and St Cuthbert’s friend Herbert, his slumber is interrupted by a plague of mice.
He works on Iona as a pre-season volunteer, and tries to sail his tiny packraft in homage to Columba. The Iona that he describes would not appeal to me: a hotchpotch of New Age spirituality, bizarre Christian legends, rather strange — “weightless” — visitors and occult stories. Even he admits to being exhausted by the island’s “myth-making microclimate”. But then, he says nothing about the life and worship of the regular community.
The trudge out of Southwark on the Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury, with its ancient echoes, is vividly described, as are the wrecked feet that make him pack up at Aylesford Priory. He does manage 27 miles across the Knoydart peninsula to the most remote pub in Britain, but it’s closed. “It seemed this pilgrimage had lost its shrine.”
His most unexpected destination is a football stadium, in a thoughtful and moving chapter about all that led from the Hillsborough tragedy to annual Anfield pilgrimages. “Liverpool became a Three Cathedral City on Hillsborough Sunday.”
On This Holy Island is pilgrim book and travelogue, Christian and pagan, history and legend, author’s journal and character-sketches. Some readers may have less patience than the author with neo-paganism, and there is a tendency to treat Christianity as another kind of folklore, with an unexamined elision of the holy into what is magical and mythical.
It is also entertaining and well-written, offbeat and informative. Smith is an interesting companion, though we know no more about him by the end than we did at the start. If the proof of pilgrimage is the return journey, we might heed the Stonehenge veteran who said: “real change could only be effected in the place that you most understood: home.” But that is over the book’s horizon.
The Revd Philip Welsh is a retired priest in the diocese of London.
On This Holy Island: A modern pilgrimage across Britain
Oliver Smith
Bloomsbury £20
(978-1-3994-0903-2)
Church Times Bookshop £18